Jane Smiley is a writer well known for her Pulitzer Prize winning effort “A Thousand Acres”, in which she adapts Shakespeare’s tragedy, “King Lear”, to a more contemporary Iowan/American-Midwestern setting. A startlingly tragic & insightful story which delved into the lives of families in a small Iowan farming community and dissected the issues of patriarchy, environmentalism, feminism and family dysfunction, her astute observational abilities and her honest representation prompted prestigious dailies such as the New York Times to call her “the Balzac of the late-20th-century American Midwest”. It was so celebrated, it even got adapted into a movie (of the same name).
Four years later however, in 1995,